Summer changes to Heritage

Just a quick update before the Summer break to let you know about some forthcoming changes to Heritage.

Periodicals

It was agreed that the term periodical doesn't mean much to most of our users so we will be changing the medium description to Journal.  The code for this field, if you use it, will remain as 'P'. This is because many reports have been set up to use the GMD code and would no longer work without editing.

PIN numbers

Staff and students will be able to change their PIN number within Heritage Online.  A new tab at the top of the screen, called Preferences, will be available which will allow users to set various preferences for the catalogue and provide an option to change their PIN number.

Heritage Online

Hopefully you will see a few differences in the look of the online catalogue by September.  A few edits will be made to the wording on some pages and watch out for the new name.

BioOne maintenance

Please see the message below from BioOne regarding downtime of their website.

Dear Subscriber,  

We want to let you know the BioOne website will be undergoing maintenance starting Friday, June 20. Scheduled downtime will begin at 9:30 p.m. Eastern Time (UTC-5) and may last up to 4 hours. During this time content and services on bioone.org will be unavailable.  

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you,

BioOne Help Desk  

LBC/IRN archive now in MediaHub

Please see the message below from EDINA regarding new content in MediaHub.

We are delighted to announce that MediaHub now searches a significant audio collection, LBC/IRN.

The London Broadcasting Company / Independent Radio News audio archive consists of 7,000 reel-to-reel tapes in a collection that runs from 1973 to the mid-1990s. It is the most important commercial radio archive in the UK and provides a unique audio history of the period. This digitised collection focuses on the most noteworthy content – approximately 3,000 hours of recordings relating to news and current affairs. Digitisation of this resource was funded via the JISC Digitisation Programme.

The collection will be of interest to anyone studying, teaching or researching media related subject areas, giving access to eyewitness reports of moments in history as well as broader analysis of news events in discussion programmes and public information broadcasts. It makes an important contribution to charting the history of radio broadcasting, offering an alternative view to the BBC’s archive collection.

New platform for Intered

The publishers of Intered, Mark Allen, have recently launched a new online platform which contains all their journals.  The old platform will be unavailable as of May.

To access Intered:

• Visit: http://www.magonlinelibrary.com/
• Click sign in (top right hand corner), then select Sign in with Shibboleth
• Pick Education
• Pick relevant publication
• A list of all available issues will be displayed

The links in Moodle will be updated over this week and if librarians could check any wording alongside the resource that would be great.  I'm hoping to get a link which will take students directly to the college log in screen so I'll let you know when all the updates are done.

New feature on mySearch

EBSCO has added a new feature to EDS (mySearch) called Research Starters which presents short, citable summaries at the top of the results list for frequently searched topics.  Information is taken from sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Salem Press.  These summaries will give an overview of the topic and links to related information.

The idea behind Research Starters was to allow students to browse through content, and narrow down their topic while growing more accustomed to the database.

Dawsonera maintenance

Please see the message below from Dawson regarding downtime for Dawsonera.


Please be advised that we will be conducting essential system maintenance on dawsonera in the forthcoming weeks and, as a result, the system will be unavailable on Saturday 5th April between 7am and 10am. There will be a second period of downtime that will occur on the following Saturday 12th April between 7am and 10am.

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Swapping books between sites

As we are now moving more items between sites for displays and other swaps we need a better way of managing how items will be loaned at the 'new' site without losing the information regarding the original location.  As we all know the constant returning to avoid the 'In Transit' status is quite a nuisance!

Fortunately help is at hand and there is way to manage this sort of thing in Heritage by using a nifty little feature on the accession record.

On the Main, front tab of the Accession record you will see the information shown below.


At the side of the Loan type and Location fields are two radio buttons labelled Current and Home.

When a book or other item is being loaned for use at another site:

• click on the Home button and fill in the usual loan type and location for the item
• the information displayed when Current is selected can then be altered to reflect the 'new' site
• when the item is returned simply change the Current information to match the information in the Home selection.

This means you will be able to issue and return the items at the 'new' site without Heritage placing the item In Transit.  Reports can also be run on the Current and Home location fields if necessary to track down items that have been 'misplaced' during this process.

Dawson extend download time

Users can now download Dawsonera e-books for up to 14 days bringing it into line with what has always been available from ebrary.

Most of our usage if via the read online option but please do let people know about the update.

If users search the Dawsonera platform there is a new option to limit books to those purchased in the last 30 days so they pick up on new titles we have bought.

Update on Ebrary books

The access to ebrary e-books under the JISC E-books for FE project comes to an end this Summer.  Negotiations are underway to work out what will be available and how we will access it.  The following information has been received from JISC regarding the current position.

Ebrary platform

The survey showed that keeping the books on the Ebrary platform was clearly the preferred option, so negotiations have begun to renew our agreement for a further term. Access to the platform will continue to be free for all registered institutions.

Current content

Access to most of the current c. 3,000 titles will cease at the end of August. What will remain are the c. 200 well-used core titles that were purchased outright, and the c. 50 titles that were licensed for two years last summer. We are currently analysing the survey results to draw up a list of the other titles that you voted to keep, and these will also remain (dependent on the publishers’ willingness to continue, and the price).

New content

We also have funds to add new content to the platform over the summer, to keep the project fresh and relevant. Again, we are analysing the survey responses, to draw up the specifications for a tender that we shall publish in May. In brief, it is envisaged that the project will continue with a collection of around 400 core, well-used titles from September, still free to all institutions.

Useful Library Words

It's easy to fall into using the jargon of your job when talking to your customers and we all know that libraries seem to have a language of their own sometimes.  So how can we help other staff and students understand some of the terms we may use.

On the E-Resources page on Moodle we have a feature called 'Useful Library Words' which has its origins in something developed for our ESOL/EFL students.  It doesn't have lots of content at the moment and so it would be great to expand it so we can explain more library jargon to students.

If you have any suggestions for other words/terms and their definition we could include please add your comments.  Current content comprises:

Borrow
Catalougue
Overdue
Renew
Reserve
Return

New look for Moodle pages

You may have already noticed but there have been some changes to the LRC and E-Resources pages on Moodle.

The new 'grid view', as announced earlier this week, has been investigated and we have tried it out on the two pages detailed above.  It makes the pages more visual and gives us the opportunity to implement something easier to use for additional resources than the 'more online resources' book.

A preview of the new layout is shown below but please take a look at it in action and leave us any feedback.

BioOne Maintenance

Please see the message below regarding scheduled maintenance to BioOne.

Dear Subscriber

We want to let you know the BioOne website will be undergoing maintenance starting Saturday 1 March 2014. Scheduled downtime will begin at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (UTC -5) and may last up to 16 hours. During this time content and services on bioone.org will be unavailable.

Most scheduled maintenance on BioOne is completed within four hours.  However, we will be performing upgrades to network equipment that require more time than the typical 4-hour window.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you

BioOne Help Desk

Dawsonera - ongoing maintenance

Please see the latest message from Dawsons below:

Dear Customer

As you know, we have recently been working hard to resolve a number of issues on dawsonera, and we would like to update you on our findings.

Title Ingestion
Since the start of January, we have added over 6000 titles to era in order to fix the perceived delay in adding new content onto dawsonera. We have increased the available resource with our supplier to address the backlog of some titles being loaded, allowing a fourfold increase in productivity. We anticipate the backlog to have reduced within a week. Some titles have been available on dawsonenter but not on dawsonera as a result of incorrect or incomplete metadata from publishers. This detail is currently being resubmitted and this will be resolved as soon as possible.

PDF Downloads
We have been tracking the PDF download time, as this has slowed significantly recently, causing understandable frustration. We have been working with our partners at Adobe to address this, resulting in two maintenance releases last week. While this has shown some small improvements, we continue to work closely with Adobe to resolve this issue in full. We have a further maintenance release on 30th January where the ‘cancel download’ dialogue box will be made clearer for users.

BT Maintenance work
Separately from any of the issues above, BT have notified us of maintenance work on all internet lines on Saturday 1st February at 4pm. This short outage will affect all Smiths News data, including dawsonenter and dawsonera. We anticipate that the site to be down for up to 30 minutes.

We apologise for the continued inconvenience you and your patrons are experiencing, and please be assured we are working hard across the business and with our partners to resolve. Thank you for your continued patience.

Update from Dawsonera

Please see the message below from Dawson regarding downloading e-books:

Dear Customer,

Following our release last week to address the problems that users were experiencing when downloading content, we are pleased to report that we have seen some improvement in download speeds this week. We still feel that this should work more quickly, however, and will continue to work with our technical specialists in order to make any further improvements where possible.

We are aware of an issue that customers are experiencing where content is unavailable and have seen the message “this title is coming soon to dawsonera”. We are still working to resolve this issue and will be performing a software upgrade on Thursday 23rd January to help resolve the problem – no downtime will be incurred while this is upgrade is performed. 

Heritage search using Media dropdown

The enquiry index rebuild failed on Tuesday evening which has affected the ability to use the Media dropdown in Advanced Search.

As everyone needs to be logged out of Heritage for the indexing process to be re-run there hasn't been a convenient time to carry this out since the process failed.

To help avoid this happening in future please could everyone ensure that they either click on Exit System at the bottom left of the screen or use File and Exit to log out of Heritage as this helps to ensure that the link to the server is closed properly.

Key Note update

The Times They Are A-Changin'... www.keynote.co.uk is changing its look At Key Note, we believe that accessing and using business intelligence should be as simple as possible... and we're sure you feel the same. How you feel about the service we offer is important and we try to use this feedback when we update and develop our products. With this in mind, we have made some changes to the homepage at www.keynote.co.uk, which we think will make using the platform even easier: >  COMING SOON... Later this month, we will be refreshing the homepage with a few adjustments to further improve usability. Prior to these changes being released, we will add a message to www.keynote.co.uk. to notify you in advance. As you can see from the image below, all of our products will now be accessed directly from the Key Note homepage, using one of the four tabs under the familiar headings of Market Reports, Company & People, List Builder and Benchmarking.

>  Company & People Information will be merged within one tab and so will be searchable from one point. >  Your login and gateway links for Athens and Shibboleth will now be displayed more prominently. >  We have tidied up the homepage to ensure that those links used more frequently have priority.

Dawson download update

Please see the message below from Dawson about this issue.

Dear Customer,

There are currently some issues regarding the download function on dawsonera which we have been working to resolve over the last few days. We have now made some immediate temporary changes to re-enable this function while we prepare and test a permanent solution over the next few days. We are taking this approach in order to thoroughly investigate the situation so that we can then assure you there will be no further risk to disruption of service later on.

Once we are completely confident about the resolution to this issue we will send out a confirmation.

We apologise to you and your users of this service for the inconvenience caused by these errors. A further update will follow as soon as possible.

Thank you

Jane JohnsonHead of UK Library Sales 

Dawsonera download problems

Dawsons have tweeted the following messages relating to the download facility for e-books:

@dawsonera
The facility to download ebooks on dawsonera is currently unavailable.  We are working to restore the service as soon as possible.

@dawsonera
We have switched the download function off.  The download button still shows but cannot be used & "downloads are currently disabled" appears.

@dawsonera
we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience whilst we resolve this issue.

Please spread the word to staff and students - the tweets were re-tweeted from the LRC account and announcement will be out shortly.

New image resource

We have signed up for free access for a year to the PYMCA courtesy of JISC.




This photo library contains over 100,000 images of social history and youth culture spanning more than 150 years.  Content featured includes, but is not limited to, fashion, music, art, design, travel, social issues, lifestyles, sports, nightlife...

PYMCA Education

This offers a huge and fully researched reference archive of over 35,000 images, thousands of essays, interviews, texts, trends and insight reports, magazine back issues, and links relating to modern (1940+) social history and youth culture.

Please take a look and pass on the details to staff and students who will find this resource useful (the link can be found on Moodle in the Images section of the E-resources page). Users will need to use the 'Login via your home institution' option for access.